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Whipped Cream (Must be cold to whip well so)
Cream must be cold to whip well, so keep it on ice until ready to whip. Take 2 earthen bowls, 6 or 8 inches in diameter. Put a pint of rich inches in diameter. Put a pint of rich cream into 1 bowl, add 2 teaspoonfuls of powdered sugar and 5 drops of best vanilla extract. Whip with a whipped cream churn until a couple of inches of froth has formed; remove the churn and skim off the whipped cream into the other bowl. So continue whipping and skimming until all the cream in the first bowl has been exhausted, and the second bowl will contain only dry whipped cream. This will keep stiff all day. The addition of half a teaspoonful of salt to a quart of cream will make it whip more readily and stand up better. The philosophy of the process is that the churn drives air into the cream, and blows an the cream, and blows an infinity of tiny bubbles, which form whipped cream. the dasher gently and slowly and bring it down quickly and forcibly. When the second bowl is full of whipped cream, pour off the liquid cream, if there is any, which has settled at the bottom into the first bowl, and whip it again. Keep the whipped cream on ice, and it will stand up good and stiff for a day.
A soda-fountain method for whipped cream made in volume, using a plunger-type cream churn rather than a whisk. The technique of skimming off the risen froth in stages is worth knowing even if you use a mixer.
- Temperature is the hingeCream at 40F or below whips fast and holds; cream above about 50F will foam loosely and collapse. Chill the bowls and the dasher as well as the cream.
- The whipped cream churnThis was a tall canister with a perforated plunger, worked straight up and down like a butter churn dasher. A balloon whisk or a stand mixer on medium does the same work; the skim-off-in-layers step is what keeps the finished cream dry rather than buttery.
- Buy the right cream"Rich cream" here means a heavy cream, probably somewhere in the region of 30-40% butterfat. Modern heavy or whipping cream at 36% or more works; ultra-pasteurized cream whips more slowly and to a slightly coarser foam, and half-and-half will not whip.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups. Two teaspoons of powdered sugar per pint is very lightly sweetened by current taste, appropriate for a topping on already-sweet fountain drinks; 2 to 4 tablespoons per pint is the usual range now.
- Vanilla and saltFive drops of extract is only about 1/16 teaspoon. The half teaspoon of salt per quart works out to about 1/4 teaspoon per pint; whether salt genuinely helps the foam stand is not well established, but a little does sharpen the flavor.
- YieldA pint of cream gives roughly a quart of whipped cream.
- Keeping it a dayThe claim holds only for well-drained, stiffly whipped cream kept genuinely cold. Expect some weeping after several hours in a home refrigerator; drain off the liquid and re-whip it as the recipe directs rather than stirring it back in.
- Know when to stopOnce the foam turns grainy and dull you are minutes from butter. Pull the dasher out the moment the froth mounds and skim.
The recipe was clearly made to be worked in batches rather than whipped to order, which is why this entry reads more like a procedure than a dessert recipe. The plunger churn it calls for is often said to have been fountain equipment around the turn of the twentieth century, and it worked on the same principle as the syringe-style cream whippers that preceded pressurized canisters: force air through the cream repeatedly rather than shear it with a blade. The skim-and-repeat method exploits the fact that the stiffest foam rises first, so finished cream was drawn off in layers and the thin cream left behind to be worked again, wasting nothing. Nitrous-oxide chargers, patented for cream whipping in the following decades, eventually made the whole routine obsolete.